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Thursday, 12 May 2016

Does Russian have Hillary's emails?

The
Kremlin is considering whether or not to release some 20,000 hacked
Clinton emails reportedly in its possession.

Russian
security services apparently obtained the emails as part of their
investigation into the Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, known as
“Guccifer” — now in U.S. custody in relation to the Clinton
email scandal.

“Guccifer”
hacked into the former secretary of state’s email. “For me, it
was easy.”

“There’s
a debate going on in the Kremlin between the Foreign Ministry and the
Intelligence Services about whether they should release the 20,000 of
Mrs. Clinton’s emails that they have hacked into,” Judge Andrew
Napolitano told Megyn Kelly on Monday.

The
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) began monitoring Lazar
after a failed attempt in 2011 to hack into RT, a news service funded
by the Russian government. While it hasn’t been confirmed publicly
by its government that Russia is in possession of the emails, there
is ample evidence which suggests the Russians do indeed have
Clinton’s emails.

Lazar
has stated publicly that he knows he is not the only hacker who was
able to — and did — gain access to Clinton’s private server.
“For me, it was easy … easy for me, for everybody,” he said in
an interview with Fox News. Everybody included “up to 10, like, IPs
from other parts of the world,” that were active on the server
while Lazar had access.

Furthermore,
RT published portions of Clinton’s emails on its website in March
2013, claiming they were supplied by “Guccifer” himself. But
given the existence of websites like Wikileaks, it’s difficult to
imagine a hacker like Lazar personally giving such sensitive
information to a news agency that is a de facto branch of the Russian
government.

Indeed,
RT's proximity to the Russian government suggests it's more likely
the agency received the emails, not from Lazar himself, but from
Russian authorities monitoring Lazar or Russian hackers themselves.
In October 2015, The Associated Press reported that Russian
authorities may have hacked Clinton's server on at least five
separate occasions.

The
existence of these emails is a significant problem for Clinton.
Despite the ongoing FBI investigation growing larger and more serious
by the day — it was revealed last week that her closest aides from
the State Department had all been interviewed, some more than once —
Clinton seems no closer to being indicted.

Indeed,
the FBI's investigation has at times seemed almost farcical. On
Monday, the State Department said it had apparently lost four years'
worth of emails from Brian Pagliano, Clinton's IT head who set up the
private server.

"Such
records might shed light on his role in setting up Clinton's server,
and why he was granted immunity by the FBI," said Republican
National Committee Deputy Communications Director Raj Shah. "But
it seems that his emails were either destroyed or never turned over,
adding yet another layer to the secrecy surrounding his role."

But
if the State Department is unable (or unwilling) to provide materials
to the FBI pertinent to its investigation, then perhaps the Russian
government will oblige.